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In an altered state (part 1)

The flight
left Australia at 11 am on Wednesday. 20 hours later I had checked in to my
hotel at 1 pm on the same day.

America.Arizona.Scottsdale.

Strange.

Asleep.

Still in
the dark of the night before, the alarm on the bedside table sounded trill and
annoying.I had not slept well.An unfamiliar bed, with too much empty
space.My body was in America, but its
clock was still in Australia – somewhere in the future.The room lacked for nothing that I needed and
contained nothing that I wanted.Dangerously,
I closed my eyes for a while to listen; there were none of the familiar noises,
no wheel squeal of metal on metal as the first trams move through the early
morning, no sounds of approaching footsteps as the kids come down to continue –
seamlessly – the conversations of last night.Words flow from them like falling water, which sleep freezes and morning
thaws.

The alarm
sounds again, and I get up.The carpet
feels different underfoot.I can’t find
my shoes. It’s the second of ten days
that will contain three Wednesdays and only one Thursday.

Peeping
through a gap in the curtains is the quickly growing light of my first morning
for 36 hours. I only know it’s morning because of the clock. I feel old.

My head
hurts, my fingers feel like sausages.Something has disconnected my senses from my brain.Fragments. Splinters. I look out of the
window.A car drives through the car
park.It feels strangely reassuring to
know I am not the only person awake.

I hate jet
lag. The thrill of travel mitigated by a lack of sleep and an unwound body
clock.

At the
breakfast bar, a lady who looks no more awake than I feel – Helen Cortez –
points at the food and says, “Help yourself, sir”.I pour crispy sugar cereal into a paper bowl
and drizzle on no fat milk.She points at a row of sweet, snow pale,
bread, and says, “This is for toast, sir”.The formality makes me smile, but in my befuddled state the help is
welcome.I manage to find the thin,
bitter coffee without help.The spoons
are plastic.I butter the toast with a
bendy knife.For all of Helen’s
attention I do not really enjoy breakfast.

Beyond the
sliding doors birds are calling. I recognise none of them.Collecting my bag I walk outside and sit on
an ornate, Greco-Roman concrete bench.A
large dark bird, like an elongated crow, lands on the roof of a parked car, its
beak curved down towards its chest, its voice a series of rattles, whistles and
croaks. Even in the three quarter light of morning its plumage ripples though
shades of blue and black; sometimes one, sometimes the other; often a mixture
of both.A duller bird, more brown than
blue, lands on the same car roof, and the volume of noise increases.A new blue-black bird arrives and a squabble
breaks out.I left home in late summer,
but maybe, here in Arizona, there is an early hint of spring in the air.A motorcycle drives nosily through the car
park, and the Great Tailed Grackles trade courtship for fear.All three birds take to the air, flicking
their great tails.

Cold air
and caffeine, sugar and the sight of new birds, combine to start the
reconnection of brain and senses. I
suspect the silhouette at the very top of a nearby tree is a humming bird.Briefly I become surprisingly awake.The silhouette departs, the tour bus arrives.
“Get in the front” the driver says,
“it’s the only seat left”. I walk around the front of the bus, towards the left
hand side to get in, but decide that it would be best if I did not drive.Laughing at myself, I walk back to the right
seat, the correct seat.

The humming
bird adrenaline seems to have worn off already.

I enjoyed the wait more than the breakfast.

Awakening

I know it’s not the wrong side of the road
– but it surely feels like it.Many of
the cars look the same, and the road signs are the same colour and in the same
language, but it’s the driving that gives me a firm sense of being
elsewhere.A small owl by the roadside
and a median strip studded with cactus complete the “I don’t think we’re in
Victoria anymore, Toto” feel.I check my
watch – back home my kids would be coming back from swimming, and an early
autumn evening would be drawing down towards darkness.Here, the thin light of the morning Sun is
shaded by cloud, and a light rain falls.Rain in the desert once more.

Our driver has a singsong voice and a
tendency to repeat himself.The bus
slows as we pass over a glassy irrigation canal.The canal is over 330 miles long we are told.330 miles!What we are not told is that water is the stolen body of the Colorado
River, which now does not reach the sea and has not done so in my lifetime.In the fields by the canal irrigation,
sprinklers stutter back and forth, shooting water onto a half empty soil.In the rain.

Out past the fast food stores and car
yards, cacti spread their film famous silhouette arms.Many have holes in the base and limbs.Owl holes.Woodpecker holes.Gun shot holes
– a strange sport.Bushes with green stems
conserve water through the hard times by doing without leaves.The palette of colours runs to pale grey
greens in the plants and red in the soil and stone. If it was not for the cacti
I could be back in Central Australia – maybe a little less red, and a little
more developed, but the connection is clear.Two deserts full of red rocks and life you can see nowhere else.I see the desert of Arizona alone in a
group.I wish my trio of redheads were
here.

The bus turns off the highway and follows a
river along a small, roughly paved, side road and into a busy car park.There are about a dozen motorbikes and two
other small tour buses parked under the arms of the Arizona sycamores – the
trees pale and leafless, the bikes shiny and polished, the buses garish with
slogans.

The trees are beautiful, but that’s not why
we are here. Beyond and through the branches a rectangular structure, a
building, sits within a natural cave in the rock face. The sharp corners of the building contrast
with the dull, plastic, edges of the cliff face.The building glows a light red orange, the
cliffs shine a chalky white.On closer
inspection the building is pock marked with stones, and its origin as baked mud
is clear.50 or so feet above the valley
floor this was a multi-storey home to a thriving community that channelled the
waters of the river towards their fields, fed their children and lived in the
cool shadows of their cliff cut homes.These were not just hunter-gatherers, these were farmers who relied on
the waters of the river and their crops of corn.These were farmers who, sometime around 1450,
packed up their belongings and left.

Today the building is known as Montezuma
Castle, a name that is wrong on both counts.It’s not a castle, and Montezuma was born 100 years after the building
was abandoned.The name is a hangover
from the early days of European exploration, when the lens of cultural
assumption was applied to all that was found.If the native people on the area were already “known” to be primitive,
anything that suggested “culture” must have been created by somebody else.So the castle and the connection were (and
are) a mental invention born of assumptions that we now know to be untrue.The question that comes to mind is “why do we
still use this name?”

(As a kid I was taught that the great rock
that sits in the centre of Australia was called “Ayers Rock” – it had been
named by the first European to see it.But it has an older, more authentic name, “Uluru”, and that is generally
how it is now known.Changing the
current names of ancient places cannot alter history, but if we acknowledge
what has gone before, it may help alter the future.)

Without being able to see inside the
building itself it’s hard to imagine what life must have been like behind the
thick mud walls, high above the valley floor.But I can be sure that when they pulled up the ladders that reached down
to the ground – either in fear or from habit – they would have had the same
concerns as we do; the future, the weather, their children.They were no more primitive than we are – it’s
just they had yet to invent the TV or mobile phone.

At the time of abandonment, a great drought
covered the lands that were to become the south-western states of America.The rains failed.The rivers failed.The crops failed.And in the end, so did this cliff cave
community.Did the leaders of these
people insist that there was no real problem?Did they say we have always had droughts?Did they say that the profits of doom were
crazy, that there was no cause for alarm?Did they keep saying these things as the families walked away from their
homes and into a future unplanned?

If they were truly like us, I suspect they
may have.

The past mirrors the present and the future
seems more uncertain than normal. We
cannot just walk away from our homes in the hope of future return. We cannot just hide the ladders in the bushes
and hope that things will turn out for the best.I think of the government back home, and
realise that I may not be the only one who is not yet fully awake.

It’s no longer raining and the sky is a
crisp blue, but in the distance there are dark clouds.A winter wind picks fallen brown leaves from
the ground and spins them upwards. A blur of bright colour moves with the leaves,
and lands, feather fluffed, on a branch.Behind me I hear the thin call of an unseen bird.The bird on the branch is a Spotted Towhee,
the unseen caller a Brown Creeper – the existing wild gathers round to remind
me of the wonders that we can still see, and in the appreciation of that wild
there is (as has been said before) a world of possibility and hope.

The path back to the van weaves between
Arizona sycamores, their branches bare, their smooth, thick trunks a patch-work
of bark flakes.Any trees within reach
of the path have been rubbed smooth by the passage of hands, polished by the
impulse to reach out and touch.A
woodpecker flies from the highest branches and a smile lights my face.The nearing horizon threatens rain, but
briefly the valley is bathed in sunlight.Weather. Climate.Culture and
change.

Back in the car park the motorbikes are
still there, but the garish vans have moved on, replaced by others.Another gust of wind lifts leaves from the
ground and sends them spinning over a rough stonewall.The farmers are long gone, the river has
returned.If there were ever places
where we should listen for the possibility of ghosts, it would be places like
this.

We drive away. The landscape moves by at
speed.The rain returns in short sharp
showers.Cold seems to seep through the
windows.I wish I had brought a thicker
coat.A grove of pecan trees.A casino on an Indian reservation, taking
money from the people who took the land.It may be profitable, but I doubt it’s equitable.One shower falls as thick rain, or thin
snow.

so well written Stewart; I really enjoyed this. I could comment on many parts you wrote but "I butter the toast with a bendy knife" made me chuckle (don't we all hate those plastic sets?1) The bus tour destination sure looks to be totally fascinating....

Great photos and a nice style of writing. I too hate those kind of breakfasts which we endured in many hotels on our trip across the states. The "castle" is interesting in how it was built so long ago and then abandoned. Makes you wonder.My daughter has an instant cure for jet lag. She lives in LA and as soon as I arrive I'm put on child minding duties....no time for jet lag.

Ah the miracles of modern travel. I think that the older we get the more our body rebels. It's great reading someone else's narrative of a journey I have made several times. Great area for birding to be sure.

Thanks for your visit to my silly pancake post. I have been to Arizona (more the northern part, like Sedona which you mention at the end). But I don't think my achy body could ever stand to be cooped up in a plane for 20 hours. you write very descriptively.

Captivated by your writing....was sorry to get to your destination. Surely more will follow? Will be looking forward to your description of Sedona. Did you take a Pink Jeep Tour? Yes, I have been there.Thanks for the visit to my blog...Come again...Janey

Stuart, I came visiting you after your comment at A Quiet Corner about cake being required on constructions sites. Loved that thought! And I am totally enchanted by what I have found here. I will be exploring your blog thoroughly and enjoying your photo gallery also. Thank you for adding a lovely little bit to my world.

I decided to stop by your wonderful poetic blog again after being away for so long, and what a lovely surprise! You were here in Arizona! How I would have loved to have met you! We went to Montezuma's Castle last summer when our family took a short vacation. As ever, this was a wonderful read! Can't wait to see the post about Sedona, but I will save that for another day. Hope your trip here was wonderful in many ways! Great photos!